by Chelsea Bonner
At the close of 2025, Screen Australia reported a record headline: $2.7 billion in drama production spend, up 43%.
On paper, it looked like a boom year. The kind of number that suggests a thriving, expanding local industry.
But when you look closer at the data behind that figure, a very different story emerges.
Screen Australia’s own reporting shows that while total spend is up, the number of Australian titles has fallen sharply, a 20% drop in local production. Children’s content has declined even more dramatically, down 41%.
So where is the growth actually coming from?
Almost entirely from international productions attracted to Australia through the Location Offset incentive. Queensland alone recorded $925 million in production spend, driven mostly by international features.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. International productions bring jobs, infrastructure investment, and global attention. They are an important part of the ecosystem.
But they are not the same thing as a healthy domestic screen industry.
What we’re seeing is a shift where headline growth is being driven by inbound production spend, while local storytelling, the foundation of a national screen culture, is contracting.
Screen Producers Australia CEO Matthew Deaner described it plainly: these figures give “a headline appearance of strength” that masks “a more fragile reality for Australian storytelling.” It’s a view that aligns with what many of us working across the creative industries are already feeling on the ground.
In conversations at this year’s AACTA Awards, with producers, directors, and screenwriters, a consistent theme kept surfacing. These were award winners, people who had just walked off the stage and within minutes the conversation had turned to broken grant processes, financing gaps, and the difference between the headlines and the reality of getting Australian projects made. There is no shortage of ideas. There is no shortage of projects ready to go. What’s missing is funding.
That distinction matters, because it tells us that this isn’t a creative slowdown. It’s a structural one.
The NSW Government’s $300 million studio announcement falls flat in a room where creatives are trying to make art now, not at some undefined future date.
What struck me most though, is that no one was defeated. Australian screen people are scrappy and motivated by the work above everything else. When the conversation turned to individual projects, the energy shifted completely. Sharing the stories we’re trying to tell stokes the fire in all of us.
If we could pay for production in optimism, we would be abundant with funds. The financial mechanisms to bring those projects to life are not keeping pace, with many producers now looking to international markets like Dubai to finance Australian stories.
The impact isn’t abstract. It’s immediate and practical.
Fewer local projects means fewer opportunities to develop new voices. It means less continuity of work for crews between larger international shoots. It means narrowing the kinds of stories that get told, and the pathways available to emerging writers, actors, and below-the-line talent.
In areas like children’s content, down 41% in a single year, the implications are even broader. It raises questions about cultural representation and the stories that younger Australian audiences are growing up with.
This is where the industry risks becoming service-based rather than story-driven. And while service work can be lucrative in the short term, it doesn’t build a national screen identity or sustain long-term careers.
International productions come to Australia for a specific set of economic advantages. When those conditions change, through currency shifts, policy adjustments, or competing incentives from other countries, that work can leave just as quickly as it arrived. California, for example, is already moving to counter production losses with its own strengthened incentive framework.
Local productions are built here, developed here, and employ Australian actors, crew, and talent.
To be fair, the Federal Government has taken meaningful steps. The Communications Legislation Amendment (Australian Content Requirement for Subscription Video On Demand Streaming Services) Bill 2025 passed parliament in late November and came into effect from 1 January 2026, requiring streaming services with more than one million Australian subscribers to invest either 10% of their total program expenditure or 7.5% of their Australian revenue on new local drama, children’s, documentary, arts, and educational content. The ABC also received a $50 million funding boost over three years to support Australian children’s and drama production.
Arts Minister Tony Burke described the legislation as “an endorsement of Australian stories, a celebration of Australian creatives, and a show of respect for the Australian audience.” Those are the right words.
But it’s worth noting the context in which they arrived. This legislation was first promised ahead of the 2022 federal election. It was shelved in late 2024 over concerns about its interaction with the Australia-United States free trade agreement. It passed in a compressed parliamentary window in November 2025, nearly four years after the original commitment. The industry welcomed it unreservedly – Matthew Deaner called it “a landmark day for Australian screen storytelling” – and rightly so. But the delay itself is instructive.
Because the data shows what happens when policy waits. In 2023-24, investment in Australian content on TV and VOD platforms had already slumped by nearly 30%. Local production was contracting in real time while the regulatory response was still being negotiated.
It is also worth being transparent about where the data sits right now. The figures in this article are drawn from Screen Australia’s Drama Report 2024-25, the most current published data available. The 2025-26 report will not be released until late 2026. We are currently in the implementation window – the law is in effect, ACMA is working through which services meet the threshold, and the first year of streamer obligations won’t be formally reported until March 2027. The real impact of the quota legislation on local production volume is yet to be measured.
And there are already questions worth watching. Streamers are permitted to acquit their obligation across a three-year window, which means a platform could theoretically concentrate spend on a single high-budget production and meet its entire quota in one hit. Industry observers have raised concern that the quota may function as a ceiling rather than a floor. These are not reasons to dismiss the legislation. They are reasons to monitor it actively, and to resist the temptation to treat its passage as the end of the conversation.
Start out how you mean to go on as the saying goes.
A resilient screen industry is not built reactively. It is not built by waiting until the numbers become alarming, legislating a correction, and then waiting again to see if it worked. It is built through consistent, proactive investment in the conditions that allow local storytelling to flourish; development funding, IP ownership frameworks, support for emerging creatives, and commissioning environments that don’t require producers to surrender their rights at the door just to get a project made.
It’s not just how much funding exists. It’s how that funding flows.
As someone who finances productions, I can clearly see the fundamental flaws in the system. Billions of dollars flow through Australian film and television via government incentives, broadcaster licence fees, loans and private investment. On paper, many productions are fully financed. And yet, projects still stall. Not because the funding isn’t there, but because it arrives too late.
The Producer Offset, one of the most important pillars of the industry, operates on a reimbursement model. Productions must spend first, complete the work, pass audits, and then wait months to receive the rebate. That delay creates a critical cashflow gap. To fill it, producers borrow against money that is already contractually owed to them. They pay interest. They restructure budgets. They absorb unnecessary financial pressure simply to access their own future income.
We have normalised a system where creative projects are forced into complex financing structures to compensate for a timing inefficiency. And in doing so, we are effectively paying private lenders to solve a government timing problem.
There is a more efficient way. Advancing a portion of the offset upfront for approved, contract-backed productions, with the remainder paid post-audit, would not increase government expenditure. It would simply improve the timing of money that is already committed.
The impact would be immediate: less interest leaking out of the production ecosystem, faster timelines, and better access for emerging producers who don’t have the relationships or resources to navigate complex gap financing structures.
With new streaming requirements set to increase production volume, this cashflow inefficiency will only scale if left unaddressed. Fix the timing, free the capital.
The streaming quota legislation is a step forward. The ABC funding is welcome. But both are responses to a problem that has been building for years. What the industry needs now is a commitment to getting ahead of the curve rather than perpetually catching up to it.
The talent exists. The ideas exist. The global demand for Australian content is real and growing. Bluey, Boy Swallows Universe, Apple Cider Vinegar, Clickbait. These aren’t anomalies. They are evidence of what Australian storytelling can do when it gets the conditions it needs.
The $2.7 billion figure is real. But it doesn’t tell the whole story.
What it does show is that Australia has proven it can compete as a global production destination.
The question now is whether we are equally committed to being a storytelling nation.
Because being a world-class production destination is not the same as being a world-class storytelling nation.
It’s time to remind government of something the data has always supported: the screen industry is a cornerstone of the Australian economy, contributing at a scale comparable to farming and mining. We are not a hobbyist cultural afterthought. We want true investment in a vital industry that has proven its worth.
Chelsea Bonner, ICON Management‘s founder and CEO, was born into the Australian performing and creative arts. Her family has worked across theatre, film and fashion for four generations. Over more than two decades she has represented talent from every angle the industry offers, fashion, screen, creators, entertainment and digital media. In recent years she has become one of Australia’s most prominent voices on the impact of generative AI on creative workers: building ethical AI technologies from the inside, making formal submissions to government, and publishing work that has placed the protection of Australian creativity firmly on the national agenda.
